The Life of a Raiding Feral Druid

Feral DPS

So last night in our 3 hours of raiding we managed to down Beth’tilac, Lord Rhyolith, Shannox, and Occu’thar. We also got some more attempts in on Alysrazor but those were mainly to get our mage ready for Thursday night flying up in the air. Apparently mage’s in fire spec are OP up there and pulling some large numbers so we are going to give it a shot.

Occu’thar was a complete pushover. 1 shot. Definitely puggable just by reading the dungeon journal I am sure. Our reward from downing him reflected the effort. 2 PvP items, one for a warrior which we did not have… at least we got VP.

Seriously… Blizzard… want to keep people interested in your game? Forget an intelligent method of authentication and figure out an intelligent method to reward loot. We sharded half our take on the night or better because we don’t employe a resto shaman. It’s disheartening and just plain sucks. Yes, I am aware all the things that have been done to make this not a big deal, like getting loot from some other grind, but just think about it.

Some feral kitty notes on the encounters thus far…

Hunter boss and his puppies – Whatever you do don’t get caught in a crystal trap. It’s not hard, I have yet to get trapped in one. If you get focused by Rage puppy move him into an immolation trap. It does damage to him and at the same time cleans up the trap so your friends won’t need to dance around it anymore. Blow berserk early and often, use kitty leap a lot to increase up time on whatever dog you are chasing around.

Spider boss – Perfect fight to be up top. Positioning is a pain between the center hole and other possible meteor created holes. Blow zerk but make sure it will be up for the final phase. In the final phase when healing gets tight make sure to use your defensive CD’s to help out.

Turning Feet boss – Honestly, this boss seems like a lost cause for me and the meters. I spend little time DPSing him until his armor is down as I am trying to be overly cautious about getting him in the right place and not wiping the raid. He dies so quickly after that I almost wonder if this is not a fight that would be better served with me as boom and killing adds.

Big Bird Boss – We have not downed her but now that I am not flying up I found that talenting into our 10 sec int is necessary. You need to stop the druids from casting their pyroblast… it hurts. Also in phase 2 the way to avoid the tornadoes is to understand how they move. They are fast so at first the pattern looks random but what you have are rings that alternate from clockwise to counterclockwise. Essentially to avoid them you run into one ring and than back out to the original ring. I would draw a fancy diagram but the easiest way to see it is to zoom way out and do an overhead view during that phase or if you are dead in the phase. Save Berserk for the bird down phase or phase 4 I believe. This is where she is down on the ground and vulnerable.

P.S. – Except for the new ring and cloak from the new quests I have not gotten any upgrades. Sadly, I am the worst geared DPS in our 10 man sitting at about 361 ilvl. Very depressing. Never did get the Heroic staff off Hal. Maybe I will get lucky and get the fire kitty staff early.

Beth the Spider went down pretty easy with a slight change in strategy. We only sent 1 melee DPS (me) up with a healer and a tank. This allowed adds to be controlled easily down below. It looks like they fixed the issue with people disconnecting when falling down the center hole up top but since I take such little fall damage in Cat form I continued to just jump down meteor holes instead. The one time I went down the center hole it was a wipe anyway and I just wanted to confirm it was fixed. One jump down is not a good set of tests but since I didn’t DC I will give Blizzard the benefit of the doubt.

Rhy was a serious pushover for us Sunday night after spending the whole night Tue working on him. They fixed the amount of damage needed to turn him in 10 man which allowed us to be successful with a 2 tank setup and 2 melee steering him. We two shot him but ranged did save our ass to do it as he almost got to drinking at the island perimeter. Had ranged not jumped in for some added DPS on the right foot we would have wiped.

Making short work of these two gave us quite a bit of practice time on Alysrazor.

Alysrazor has some seriously epic trash you need to clear before starting the encounter. 2 casters are channeling to 2 big birds. Kill the casters but as soon as you start the pull have 2 people run to each bird and jump on their heads. These players can now control the birds. Use their attack to destroy eggs on the ground while the raid kills hatchlings in the center of the room. Once all the eggs are destroyed turn the birds on each other until one or both are dead. When you are left with one bird the raid can quickly down that one as it is controlled and attacking nothing away from the raid.

I am the person jumping up and flying doing the rings and DPSing her in the air. It’s pretty challenging and I think my best attempt I put out about 25-30K damage. I am thinking it might be better for a caster to do it because in order to see and get the rings you have to be quite a bit behind the boss which seemed to drop me out of range from time to time where a caster would not have an issue. It probably makes the most sense to have the highest DPS person of your group be the one to go up (as long as it is not a pet class).

The new dailies are not terrible. They go pretty fast. It is important to do them everyday if you are interested in the gear that will be unlocked as dedication will still have you taking over a month to unlock all the vendors.

That is about it for now as we forge ahead in Firelands I will continue to update.

As it turns out however the strategy of having me tank and our DK go to heals and our Holy pally go to ret didn’t work out. I believe it was a gearing issue with having the pally go ret…. but anyway…

We downed Shannox without too much drama or attempts. FYI many times I lined up Riplimb so he would hit a crystal trap and they would not activate. After a while if this kept happening I would have to kite him over to a trap and do the Mexican hat dance in order to get it to go off…. very annoying. Also, in order to spawn Shannox you have to clear a bunch of trash before he will spawn. You will get emotes that a hunter is angry or what not, eventually he shows up. IMHO clear trash up to Beth’tilac and then continue clearing trash along the road toward where the map shows Shannox until he spawns. From there you will run back to the area right before Beth’tilac to do the fight.

I believe our best attempt had her to about 10%. The fight is bugged at the moment and just about every time someone would jump down using the middle hole they would DC (every time for me). The fix was to drop down the holes created my the meteors. Make sure to switch to cat first before dropping down so you take less fall damage. Once they fix the middle hole this won’t be an issue because if you go down the middle you are lowered down slowly using the same strands that you went up on. We thought it might be connected to my form, being bear, so we sent up our pally tank but he also DC’ed the minute he tried to come down. All of a sudden being a feral tank and being able to shift to cat for the jump down paid off…. under 1K fall damage.

On our best attempt we basically ignored DPS on the boss. Unfortunately things were so crazy down below she dropped down and was promptly healed to 100%… so yeah, we went 90% before dying in that burn phase (our healers are insanely good). Sunday I am going to go up as the lone melee DPS to work her down… I am looking forward to it.

Later today I will try and post up a more comprehensive post on the fights I have done this far.

1. New quest chain and cut scenes were pretty cool. You get a sweet epic cloak at the end for FREE!
2. New raid content mechanics seem fun (we wiped all night trying to steer a boss by dpsing his feet).
3. Firelands raid has lots of trash. You don’t have to clear it all but is there if you want to farm early rep and epic patterns/weapons. It not difficult, stay clear of turtles.
4. I want to say my dps is higher but Recount was broke.
5. Happy that most adds are completely functional.(Gatherer doesn’t like Firelands area for those of you getting LibMap errors.)
6. Happy I was able to log in before 9pm est.
7. IBTL… Changes to CC are so hax.

Don’t get me wrong, I am excited about new content, quests, gear, etc.

I wish I was more excited about the buff to Kitty damage.

Why am I not you ask?

Well, rumor has it Firelands raiding is still as melee unfriendly as the current raiding content. (Note, I still only believe this to be the case for Heroic T11 raiding and assuming it will be the same for T12, or worse)

When your 10 man raiding team is expecting you to be boomkin going forward… how excited can you get about feral DPS?

It’s sad really, but I don’t think I am alone in wondering where blizzard went wrong in the “bring the player. not the class” mentality.

As a druid I am fortunate to have the option to play a caster for an expansion. But what of warriors, rogues, and pally’s that want to DPS? Is it no coincidence rogues seem less and less plentiful?

I am still excited and I look forward to playing more boomkin unless needed for some OT/DPS duties on specific fights… but I would have preferred it to be the other way around where going boomkin would be the exception and not the rule.

Thoughts anyone? My guess is people raiding 25’s have less of an issue. We are finding it harder and harder to get the people for a 25 man run. Either through disinterest, scheduling, or just lack of players at any given time.

I really prefer the 10 man format, but it does seem the tuning is just brutal and is possibly hurting the ideology of playing with friends regardless of class.

Oh well, I will continue to trudge on hoping we can at least keep the numbers for one or two 10 man teams in our guild.